Adapting To Life
by TalliW
Summary: Danny is trapped in the past after episode 3x10 with the prehistoric people Written for the Prompt Meme: Danny Quinn, pre-hominids


AN: Written for the Prompt Meme: Danny, pre-hominids

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At first they had watched him distrustfully.

He had to look odd to them in his colourful clothes and he wasn't sure how best to come into contact with the strange creatures.

Danny didn't even know if they could see the colours the way he saw them. He never had been interested much in biology or evolutionary theory before.

Accepting their suspicions of him, he'd kept to himself, trying to adapt to this life on his own.

But Danny Quinn had fast learned that living in the prehistoric world was no bed of roses. He'd had more difficulties than he'd expected.

After he had laid down on the hard ground again with an empty stomach, he thought about Helen who had managed to survive eight years in the past alone, and got angry. He'd always been so resourceful in the modern world, surely he could manage without all those technical gadgets as well. But his growling stomach had told him otherwise.

Two days later, a child had come over as he was taking a short nap, too exhausted from his fruitless attempts to catch some fish in the stream, and had poked him with a stick. He'd grasped the sharp stick but had not done anything else. The small pre-hominid had run away, leaving his stick. Also leaving Danny with the fear that the rest of the tribe would now finish him off. He knew he was far to weak to defend himself against a whole group of prehistoric people.

He had got up and carefully crept closer to the group, putting the stick down on a stone for them in plain sight before he'd scurried back to his own place.

The next morning, he found a palm-sized piece of meat and some roots next to him. Danny had wolfed down the roots instantly and, after some consideration, the raw chewy meat as well, too hungry to care any more and it had tasted astonishing good.

Afterwards, he had tried again to get a fire going with a stick and some rotten wood, wishing he was a smoker and therefore have had a cigarette lighter or some matches to hand.

When two young pre-hominids, armed with a stick, had waved him to follow some hours later, he had done it without fear. What did he have to lose if he was not even be able to make a fire at all.  
They had led him to a dead elephant-like young animal which had been washed ashore by a river two kilometres away where the adults were already busy scavenging the meat from the body.

The dead animal was already showing large wounds in its flank from some carnivores and the earlier hominids had worked fast, always aware that the smell would soon attract other predators as well.

His pocketknife had been very useful for cutting the tough meat from the bones and loaded with large pieces of meat they had returned later to the cave by the stream later.

His stomach had recoiled at the thought of eating that meat. It wasn't exactly fresh any more. But hearing the smacking noises from the early hominids had finally thrown his inhibitions overboard and he'd taken his first bite.

Danny had stayed close to the group when they gathered food but otherwise he had backed away.

The day his pocketknife broke as he bared the roots of a plant, he'd sobbed like a little child and mourned his broken tool. His back pack got lost when he fell into the river as he was fleeing from a hunting predetor.

Some weeks later his chequered shirt was so torn he'd discarded it beside the haws bush he'd been pushed in during a conflict with the leader of the pre-hominids who had seen him as a competitor.

By now his beard had grown and his formerly white shirt was now as covered in smut, he looked almost like the early hominids from a distance.

A deadly attack on the strong male by some predator, which Connor could probably have told him the name of, had made the group leaderless.

Without a second thought Danny tried to take over the tribe. The fight with the other contender had been fast and bloody and Danny had come out as the winner.

Now the group of females and adolescents were his.

The moment he took one of the woman by the hand and shepherded her inside the small cave he had chuckled sheepishly, his yearning for physically contact and his sexual desire too strong to resist any longer.

At the end Danny had been felt more sick than aroused as his attempts to take her in the missionary position were met with resistance. Finally, he'd complied with her wishes and had mounted her from behind.

He even managed to block out the knowledge that the woman he was with had more hair than him and didn't exactly look like the woman he would usually have preferred. In his mind it was Jenny Lewis he made love with and afterwards held in his arms.

Two years after he'd buried his last hope of rescue, he finally stopped thinking of Jenny as well and didn't even dream of home any more. Dwelling on the past was useless when you had a family to protect.

Casting a last glance over his people, the man, once called Danny Quinn, lay down for the night and closed his eyes.

The light of the moon was shining on the only human between the group of Australopithecines, in the same way the moon would still do more than three million years later, on the ARC where Connor and Abby Temple still tried to find an Anomaly to Danny, years after everyone else had given up.


End file.
